Hmm, I wonder if a PSOE-C's coalition with Podemos supply is at all possible.

1. C's and Podemos are fundamentally opposed over the Catalan issue. C's probably prefers Article 155 to the current events, while Podemos is fine with the Catalan govt holding a referendum. If the unstable Spanish government is brought down over Catalonia, this government won't come into being.

2. The poll posted with seat projections had PP+C's having a confident majority, far removed from the troubles of the current government. That would be the government forming in the event of new elections.

If only Susana Diaz had won...

If Susana Diaz won, the three major parties would be PP, C and Podemos. C does already have the centrist centralist electorate and electors usually prefer the original.

And the current leader is pretty much a Podemos rep.

^wtf

On a side note we had a host of Catalan mayors march into the European Quarter to hold some speeches, and Addidas have released the Spain World Cup kit with the Republican flag on it, triggering the entire Spanish Right-wig twittersphere, and according to the Spanish football federation "people right from the top".

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Also apparently Vox is given a seat in some nationwide polls? I thought they faded to irrelevance? Who is leading them these days?

Yeah, the reaction to the Spanish shirt on the world cup has been pretty funny.

And here's the actual poll where VOX gets a seat:

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I personally think it's an outlier (not just VOX getting a seat out of nowhere but also Cs breaking 20%), but maybe its findings will be confirmed later who knows.

As for who is leading them, shortly after narrowly failing to get seats in the 2014 EU elections, their leader, was replaced with former MP in the Basque regional parliament Santiago Abascal. He has also tried to steer the party in a different direction, making it more of a Spanish AfD or PVV, adopting very harsh rethoric against muslim inmigration and terrorism. They also want to completely abolish the comunidades autonomas and are extremely hardline on Catalonia.

While they did indeed fade to irrelevance for the most part, for all what's worth they have a large following in Spain's largest forum board: Forocoches. Of course, Forocoches is basically the Spanish 4chan so it's no surprise they win big there. For all what's worth their latest horrible poll has:

Cs: 32.9%VOX: 21.3%PP: 9.0%PSOE: 3.8%

So yeah, definitely nothing remotely reliable. In fact VOX used one of their polls as proof that they were doing good in the 2016 election and got mocked in the internet.

For all what's worth though the "others" category has been slowly rising in most polls so maybe they are indeed right, but we can't really know who is in there. It could have also been PACMA or even UPyD (another outlier gave them like 3% this August but no other polls confirmed that so I guess it was a junk poll).

If a new non nationalist party wants to get a seat, their number 1 priority should be to get at least 3% of the vote in either Madrid or Barcelona provinces, which basically guarantees that they'll get a seat. The lowest percentage with which a national party has received seats was UPyD in 2008 who got 1 seat with 1.19% of the vote nationally (3.7% in Madrid). And the highest with no seats was CDS in 1993, which got 1.76% of the vote nationally but narrowly missed the theshold in Madrid (got 2.99% of the vote, missing the threshold by 440 votes).

So depending on how well concentrated VOX's vote is, they might be able to get 1 seat with as low as 1.6% of the vote (what they got in the 2014 EU election).

The electoral system is constituency based, so there is no real threshold per se (I think there is a set threshold of three percent per constituency, but most of them are small constituencies with a higher effective threshold).

I'm going to pump for PACMA?

Also, the reason to oppose Diaz isn't just because of ideology, Bloomberg. The Southern barons are, erm, not good backers.

In practice the threshold only really applies to Madrid and Barcelona provinces as every other place doesn't have enough seats for a party with 3% to get in. After Madrid and Barcelona (with more than 30 seats each) the next largest would be Valencia but that one only has 15 seats so to get a seat there you would need to be at around 5% or so.

The seats are distributed accorging to constituencies, not all of Spain. So in theory you could have a party winning the popular vote but getting less seats. That was a possibility between Podemos and PSOE in the run up to the 2016 election, some thought PSOE would get more seats but a lower popular vote percentage than Podemos. In the end they ended up winning both.

And as for PACMA, they got their best result in Barcelona (1.8% while they were at 1.2% nationally). In theory a good campaign could mean a seat for PACMA in Barcelona but it's highly unlikely.

If PSOE and Citizens combined got over 175 seats (or close enough they could do a deal with some regional parties) - could they forma government together and dispense with the need to accommodate PP and Podemos altogether?

If PSOE and Citizens combined got over 175 seats (or close enough they could do a deal with some regional parties) - could they forma government together and dispense with the need to accommodate PP and Podemos altogether?

No regional party would ever want to support a government with Citizens in.

If PSOE and Citizens combined got over 175 seats (or close enough they could do a deal with some regional parties) - could they forma government together and dispense with the need to accommodate PP and Podemos altogether?

No regional party would ever want to support a government with Citizens in.

The Canarian parties would but they will almost certainly only get 1 seat from CC. NCa ran alongside PSOE last time so in any PSOE led coalition they'll support that

I think the next bifurcation point would be the Catalan elections Dec and see if the pro-Independence forces and capture a majority. If so the crisis would get worse and PP/C would gain at the expense of of PSOE.

I think the next bifurcation point would be the Catalan elections Dec and see if the pro-Independence forces and capture a majority. If so the crisis would get worse and PP/C would gain at the expense of of PSOE.

For all what's worth, while the Metroscopia poll is 100% real and from a decent polling company, Metroscopia has consistently overpolled Cs. I do believe that Cs has increased quite a lot and has overtaken Podemos, but they are probably still at 20% or lower, with PSOE ahead of them by a couple points.

Also, notice the increase in "others". It's at 13.8% while on the general election of 2016 it was at 10.1%. This makes me think that maybe that poll that gave VOX a seat was not an outlier after all or that PACMA might be able to get a seat.

The time to register as a party to be able to take part in the Catalan election has ended. The following parties will present candidates. The ones with a chance to get seats appear in a colour other than black.

Party leaders and candidatesPSC-PSOE: Miquel Iceta PP: Xavier García AlbiolERC: Oriol Junqueras is the number 1 in the list but he is in jail. The de facto leader is Marta RoviraCs: Ines ArrimadasCUP: Carles Riera. CUP has a strict one term policy for their leaders so their former leaders, Anna Gabriel and Antonio Baños are nowhere in the lists.En Comú Podem: Xavier DomenechJunts x Catalunya: Carles Puigdemont. He is in Belgium and I have no idea who the actual leader is. This is PDECat but under another name basically. Though the list includes a lot of independents (including the 2 Jordis that are in jail) and very few who are actually from PDECat.

Of the minor lists, I'd say the only interesting ones are PACMA (who has a very small chance of getting seats, the threshold seems to be 3%), Convergents (founded by a corrupt regional minister, trying to be like the former Unió, as in nationalist but not secessionist) and maaaybe Recortes Cero (far left, even more than Podemos, but hardline unionist) and Democracia Nacional (the only far right party that is contesting the election). Also, apparently Dialeg República was an ERC list they registered in case the party was illegalized but they weren't able to drop out.

Slightly less than 1 month before the Catalan election, the polling average seems to be this:

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Secesionists win 45.5-42.9-9.1 and they also win in seat count 67-57-11. They seem to have lost the psychologic barrier of 68 seats (a majority) but honestly that's still a toss up.

I personally hope they lose their majority, that way someone can at least hit the brakes and slow down things.

Also, it seems that the lists of candidates I posted before were temporary, and some of them apparently won't be able to run. In fact other than the ones that will get seats only PACMA, PUM+J, Recortes Cero and Dialeg Republica (idk why ERC didn't drop this list in the end) were allowed to run.

Is there really a chance of the revival of the tripartit of 2003 (CeC replacing ICV obviously)? That was one of the better regional governments in recent years, and it could reconcile Catalan society while pushing for more autonomy. But given what happened in Barcelona it seems like PSC, CeC and ERC can't even get along at the local level over the Catalan national issue.